Volume 55, Number 24   March 3 , 2008         

Winning colors
A Feb. 21 Glasgow Herald article on color psychology and athletic performance featured Professor of Psychology David Matsumoto's research on how blue uniforms affect international judo contests. "If you talk to judo players, some of them will tell you they feel different when they wear blue than white. They're not used to it, and they find it unsettling. That might give them the edge that makes them more aggressive," Matsumoto said. "It may be that wearing blue makes athletes more aggressive, or it could be that judges perceive them to be more aggressive and award higher scores."
 
Personalizing history
A new book about Filipinos living in Stockton by Assistant Professor of History Dawn Mabalon was chronicled by the Stockton Record on Feb. 20. The book consists of more than 200 historical photographs of Central Valley Filipino immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries. "It's really eye-opening, the continuity of experiences. As different as the different generations are … there are also really common threads that run through all generations of Filipinos in Stockton that we wanted to emphasize in this book," Mabalon said. "I hope people will see that history is everywhere and that history isn't just about wars or presidents or national events. History is in our everyday lives and our everyday actions."
 
Changing Cuba
In a Feb. 19 CBS5 Eyewitness News broadcast about Fidel Castro's resignation, Associate Professor of Raza Studies Nancy Mirabal suggested that future U.S.-Cuba relations remain uncertain. "It depends on the new president of the United States. If the person elected is willing to have a much more open relationship with Cuba, I think Cuba will follow as well," Mirabal said. "All the mechanisms of the state are still in place. They still have the same assembly, and they still have the same political structures."

Conducting the masses
Assistant Professor of Music and Dance David Xiques was quoted in the Feb. 25 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, regarding his participation in the recent All-City Music Festival of ensembles from SF public high schools. Xiques conducted a chorus. "It's a matter of waving the flag, bringing out the pom-poms, and then getting everyone to agree in just five hours on one way to produce a sound," he said. Associate Professor of Music and Dance Cyrus Ginwala conducted an orchestra at the festival.

Discussing migrant workers
James Quesada, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed on the Feb. 15 edition of NPR's Latino USA to discuss how the recession is negatively affecting Latino migrant laborers' capacity to send remittances back to their families in their native homelands. "The amount of money and capacity to send money back has become increasingly difficult to do," Quesada said. "The thing I hear over and over is not only how difficult it is, but how it's almost impossible."

For more media coverage of faculty, staff, students, alumni and programs, see SF State in the News.

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Last modified March 3, 2008 by University Communications.